Journal of Economic Geography 4 (2004) pp. 479–499 doi:10.1093/jnlecg/lbh038 A perspective of economic geography Allen J. Scott* Abstract The paper opens with a statement on the social embeddedness of knowledge. The disciplinary situation and practices of economic geographers are reviewed in the light of this statement. The rise of a new geographical economics is noted, and its main thrust is summarized in terms of a description of the core model as formulated by Krugman. The geographers’ reception of the new geographical economics is described, and some key aspects of this reception are assessed. I then subject the core model itself to critical evaluation. Its claims about pecuniary externalities in the context of Chamberlinian competition provide a number of useful insights. However, I argue that the model is deficient overall in the manner in which it tackles the central problem of agglomeration. The discussion then moves on to consideration of the recent interest shown by many economic geographers in issues of culture. After a brief exposition of what this means for economic geography, I offer the verdict that this shift of emphasis has much to recommend it, but that in some of its more extreme versions it is strongly susceptible to the temptations of philosophical idealism and political voluntarism. In the final part of the paper, I attempt to pinpoint some of the major tasks ahead for economic geography in the phase of post-‘late capitalism’. I suggest, in particular, that a new cognitive map of capitalist society as a whole is urgently needed, and I offer some brief remarks about how its basic specifications might be identified. Keywords: conceptual bases of economic geography; cultural turn; geographical economics; methodology; philosophy of geography JEL classifications: R10, Z19 1. In search of perspective In this paper, I attempt to evaluate a number of prominent claims put forward in recent years by both geographers and economists about the methods and scope of economic geography. Much of the paper revolves around two main lines of critical appraisal. First, I seek to the strong and weak points of geographical economics as it has been formulated by Paul Krugman and his co-workers (though I also acknowledge that geographical economics is now moving well beyond this initial point of departure). Second, I provide a critique of the version of economic geography that is currently being worked out by a number of geographers under the rubric of the cultural turn, and * Department of Geography, University of California–Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA. email < ajscott@ucla.edu> Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 4, No. 5, # Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved. 480  Scott here I place special emphasis on what I take to be its peculiar obsession with evacuating the economic content from economic geography. On the basis of these arguments, I then make a brief effort to identify a viable agenda for economic geography based on an assessment of the central problems and predicaments of contemporary capitalism. This assessment leads me to the conclusion that the best bet for economic geographers today is to work out a new political economy of spatial development based on a full recognition of two main sets of circumstances: first, that the hard core of the capitalist economy remains focused on the dynamics of accumulation; second, that this hard core is irrevocably intertwined with complex socio-cultural forces, but also that it cannot be reduced to these same forces. In order to ground the line of argument that now ensues, we need at the outset to establish a few elementary principles about the production and evaluation of basic knowledge claims. A large recent body of work in the theory of knowledge and social epistemology has made us increasingly accustomed to the notion that research, reflection, and writing are not so much pathways into the transcendental, as they are concrete social phenomena, forever rooted in the immanence of daily life. By the same token, knowledge is in practice a shifting patchwork of unstable, contested, and historically-contingent ideas shot through from beginning to end with human interests and apologetic meaning (Barnes, 1974; Rorty, 1979; Latour, 1991; Shapin, 1998). Mannheim (1952), an early exponent of the sociology of knowledge, expressed something of the same sentiments in the proposition that the problems of science in the end are mediated outcomes of the problems of social existence. Postmodernists, of course, have picked up on ideas like these to proclaim the radical relativism of knowledge and the dangers of ‘totalization’ (cf. Dear, 2000), though the first of these claims carries the point much too far in my opinion, and the second turns out on closer examination to be largely a case of mistaken identity. I accept that knowledge is socially constructed and not foundational, but not that it is purely self-referential, for although knowledge is never a precise mirror of reality, it does not follow—given any kind of belief that some sort of external reality actually exists—that one mirror is as good as another (Sayer, 2000). The aversion to so-called totalization among many geographers today seems to translate for the most part, in a more neutral vocabulary, into the entirely sensible principle that theories of social reality should not claim for themselves wider explanatory powers than they in fact possess. However, the principle strikes me as pernicious to the degree that it is then used to insinuate that small and unassuming concepts are meaningful and legitimate whereas large and ambitious concepts are necessarily irrational. This in turn has an unfortunately chilling effect on high-risk conceptual and theoretical speculation. These brief remarks set the stage for the various strategies of assessment of economic geography that are adopted in what follows. We want to be able to account for the shifting substantive emphases and internal divisions of the field in a way that is systematically attentive to external contextual conditions, but which does not invoke these conditions as mechanical determinants. We must, in particular, be alert to the social and institutional frameworks that encourage or block the development of ideas in certain directions, as well as to the professional interests that drive choices about research commitments. Moreover, since science is (either consciously or unselfconsciously) a vehicle for the promotion of social agendas, we need to examine the wider ideological and political implications of any knowledge claims. A basic question in this regard is: whose interests do they ultimately serve, and in what ways? The simple posing of this question implies already that the form A perspective of economic geography  481 of appraisal that follows entails a degree of partisan engagement (Haraway, 1991; Yeung, 2003), though in a way, I hope (given my preceding critical comments on relativism), that maintains a controlled relationship to an underlying notion of coherence and plausibility. Last but by no means least, then, we must certainly pay close attention to the logical integrity, the scope of reference, the correspondence between ideas and data, and so forth, of the various versions of economic geography that are on offer. 2. Economic geographers at work 2.1. Geography and the disciplinary division of labor Geographers long ago gave up trying to legislate in a priori terms the shape and form of their discipline. In any case, from what has gone before, we cannot understand geography, or any other science for that matter, in relation to some ideal normative vision of disciplinary order. Geography as a whole owes its current standing as a distinctive university discipline as much to the inertia of academic and professional institutions as it does to any epistemological imperative. The geographer’s stock-in-trade, nowadays, is usually claimed to revolve in various ways around questions of space and spatial relations. This claim provides a reassuring professional anchor of sorts, but is in practice open to appropriation by virtually any social science, given that space is intrinsically constitutive of all social life. In fact, geographers and other social scientists regularly encounter one another at points that lie deep inside each other’s proclaimed fields of inquiry, and this circumstance reveals another of modern geography’s peculiarities, namely its extreme intellectual hybridity. It is perhaps because of this hybridity that geography is so susceptible to rapidly shifting intellectual currents and polemical debate, but also—and this is surely one of its strengths—an unusual responsiveness to the burning practical issues of the day. 2.2. The wayward course of economic geography in the last half-century Economic geography reproduces these features of geography as a whole in microcosm. On the one side, it is greatly influenced by issues of social and political theory. On the other side, given its substantive emphases, it has particularly strong areas of overlap with economics and business studies. At any given moment in time, it nevertheless functions as a more or less distinctive intellectual and professional community that brings unique synthetic perspectives to the tension-filled terrain(s) of investigation that it seeks to conquer. At the same time, economic geography has been greatly susceptible to periodic shifts of course over the last several decades, often in surprising ways, and equally often with the same dramatis personae, as it were, appearing and re-appearing in different costumes in different acts of the play. The period of the 1950s and 1960s was especially important as a formative moment in the emergence of economic geography as a self-assertive subdiscipline within geography as a whole. This was a period of great intellectual and professional struggle in geography between traditionalists and reformers, with the latter seeking to push geography out of its perceived idiographic torpor and—on the basis of quantitative methodologies and formal modeling—into a more forthright engagement with theoretical ideas (Gould, 1979). Economic geographers were in the vanguard of this movement, and they were able to push their agendas vigorously, partly because of their strategic affiliation with a 482  Scott then-powerful regional science, partly because the questions they were posing about the spatial organization of the economy were of central concern to much policy making in the capitalism of the era, with its central mass-production industries and its activist forms of social regulation as manifest in Keynesian economic policy and the apparatus of the welfare state (Benko, 1998; Scott, 2000). This early moment of efflorescence was succeeded by a sharp turn toward political economy as the crises of the early 1970s mounted in intensity, and as the general critique of capitalism became increasingly vociferous in academic circles. This was a period in which geographers developed a deep concern about the spatial manifestations of economic crisis generally, as reflected in a spate of papers and books on topics of regional decline, job loss, regional inequalities, poverty, and so on (Carney et al., 1980; Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Massey and Meegan, 1982). It was also a period in which much of economic geographers’ portrayal of basic social realities was cast either openly and frankly in Marxian terms or in variously marxisant versions. The first stirrings of a vigorous feminist encounter with economic geography also began to take shape at this time. As the initial intimations of the so-called new economy made their appearance in the early 1980s, and as the crisis years of the 1970s receded, economic geography started to go through another of its periodic sea changes. A doubly-faceted dynamic of economic and geographic transformation was now beginning to push geographers toward a reformulated sense of spatial dynamics. On the one hand, new spatial foci of economic growth were springing up in hitherto peripheral or quasi-peripheral regions in the more economically-advanced countries, with neo-artisanal communities in the Third Italy and high-technology industrial districts in the US Sunbelt doing heavy duty as early exemplars of this trend (Scott, 1986; Becattini, 1987). In this connection, geographers’ interests converged intently on the theoretical and empirical analysis of spatial agglomeration. On the other hand, a great intensification of the international division of labor was rapidly occurring, especially under the aegis of the multinational corporation (Fröbel et al., 1980). In this connection, the main issues increasingly crystallized around globalization and its expression in international commodity chains, cross-border corporate linkages, capital flows, foreign branch plant formation, and so on (e.g., Dicken, 1992; Johnston et al., 1995; Taylor et al., 2002). The themes of agglomeration and international economic integration more or less continue to dominate the field today, though many detailed changes of emphasis have occurred as research has progressed. Indeed, of late years, these two themes have tended increasingly to converge together around the notion of the local and the global as two interrelated scales of analysis within a process of economic and political rescaling generally (Swyngedouw, 1997). These thematic developments represent only a thumb-nail sketch of the recent intellectual history of economic geography. We must recognize that there have been many additional twists and turns within this history, both of empirical emphasis and of theoretical debate. As it stands, however, this account now serves as a general point of entry into a detailed examination of some of the major conceptual tensions that run through the field today, including a number of claims, which if they can be sustained, presage some quite unexpected new directions of development. 2.3. Turbulence and challenge Economic geography, then, has been marked over its post-War history by a great susceptibility to turbulence. A notable recent sign of this tendency is the various A perspective of economic geography  483 ‘turns’ that the field is said to have taken or to be about to take. A cursory count reveals an empirical turn (Smith, 1987), an interpretative turn (Imrie et al., 1996), a normative turn (Sayer and Storper, 1997), a cultural turn (Crang, 1997), a policy turn (Martin, 2001), and a relational turn (Boggs and Rantisi, 2003), among others. In some instances, the proclamation of these turns has been no more than an attempt to test the waters. In others, it has registered some real underlying tendency in geographic research. Today, the field is subject to particularly strong contestation from two main sources. One of these lies largely outside geography proper and is being energetically pushed by economists under the rubric of a new geographical economics. It represents a major professional challenge to economic geographers by reason of its threatened appropriation and theoretical transformation of significant parts of the field. The other is represented by the cultural turn that comes in significant degree from within geography itself, but also reflects the wider politicization of cultural issues and the rise of concerns about identity in contemporary society. The cultural turn represents a very different kind of challenge to economic geography on account of its efforts to promote within the field a more highly developed consciousness of the role of culture in the eventuation of economic practices. Much of the rest of this paper is concerned with investigating the nature of this current conjuncture in the light of the arguments already marshalled. 3. Geographical economics: accomplishments and deficits 3.1. The core model Krugman’s Geography and Trade, published in (1991) rang a tocsin in the ears of geographers, with its twofold proclamation that the project of economic geography was now at last beginning, and that economic geographers (of the variety found in geography departments) had hitherto been more or less sleeping at the wheel. The new geographical economics did not, as we might expect, reach back to regional science, but appeared quite unexpectedly from another quarter: the new growth and trade theories that had been taking shape in economics over the previous decade or so (Thisse, 1997; Meardon, 2000). The core model is built up around the idea of monopolistic competition as originally propounded by Chamberlin (1933) and subsequently formalized by Dixit and Stiglitz (1977). The model also has some points of resemblance to an older tradition of heterodox economics focussed on increasing returns and cumulative causation, as represented by Hirschman (1958), Myrdal (1959), and Kaldor (1970). Strictly speaking, Krugman’s model, and the surge of research activities that it has sparked off, are not neoclassical, for it firmly eschews any notion of constant returns to scale and perfect competition. That said, the model retains a strong kinship with mainstream economics by reason of its commitment to methodological individualism, full information, utility-maximizing individuals and profit-maximizing firms, and an exclusive focus on socially disembedded relationships of exchange (Dymski, 1996). The model itself is an ingenious if convoluted piece of algebra. Imagine a set of regions1 with production represented by immobile farmers and mobile manufacturing workers 1 Because of the model’s complexity, it is typically defined in terms of just two regions for expository purposes. 484  Scott and firms. Manufacturing firms engage in product differentiation (monopolistic competition) with increasing returns to scale, or better yet, unexhausted economies of scale. Thus, each firm produces a unique or quasi-unique variety in its given product class. Consumers in all regions (both farmers and manufacturing workers) purchase some portion of every firm’s output. Wages are determined endogenously. Market prices always reflect the transport costs incurred in product shipment. Consumers in regions with many producers will therefore pay less than those less favorably situated. Any individual’s ‘utility’ is a function of both nominal wages and price levels. Mobile manufacturing workers will migrate from (peripheral) regions with lower utility to (core) regions with higher utility. Nominal wages in any region whose manufacturing labor force is increasing in this way will tend to fall (though corresponding utilities will increase because of the decreasing cost of final goods). More and more manufacturing firms will therefore be attracted to the region, which will in turn induce further in-migration of labor. The net result will be a path-dependent process of spatial development leading to a stable core-periphery pattern. Eventually an equilibrium of production, wages, prices, and demand will be attained, and the final result will exhibit market-driven pecuniary externalities (i.e., overall real price reductions) derived from intra-firm increasing returns under conditions of Chamberlinian competition. In a later formulation of the core model, Krugman and Venables (1995) showed that core-periphery contrasts will tend to be relatively subdued (or even to disappear entirely) in situations where transport costs are uniformly very high or very low, whereas core-periphery contrasts will be maximized where transport costs are contained within some intermediate range of values. Depending on the distribution of immobile workers, transport costs, elasticities of demand and substitution, and other basic parameters, the model is capable of generating widely varying locational outcomes. Numerous modifications and extensions of the basic model have been proposed since its first formulation. For example, Krugman and Venables (1995, 1996) and Venables (1996) introduce interindustrial linkages into the model. Abdel-Rahman and Fujita (1990) have suggested that the production functions of downstream industries are sensitive to the variety of available upstream inputs. In this case, agglomeration and pecuniary externalities are brought about by the productivity effects of input variety. In another variation of the model, Baldwin (1999) has shown how demand-linked circular causality can induce agglomeration, even in the absence of labor mobility.2 3.2. The geographers’ reception of geographical economics Rather predictably, the geographers’ first reaction to the new geographical economics was one of virtually unqualified rejection. In a brief review of Krugman’s book, Johnston (1992, p.1066) dismisses it with the comment ‘not recommended’. Martin (1999, p.67) writes that 2 Other work in contemporary geographical economics (not all of it strictly in line with the core model) include regional income inequalities (Barro and Sala-i-Martin, 1995; Quah, 1996), the dynamics of city systems (Ellison and Glaeser, 1997; Duranton and Puga, 2000), regional productivity and growth (Henderson, 2003), and so on. My remarks in this paper are focused on the narrower (Krugmanian) view of geographical economics, both because of the extremely large claims that have been made on its behalf and because of its current centrality in the entire project of geographical economics (but see my later assessment of how this situation may change). A perspective of economic geography  485 geographical economics, ‘is not that new and it most certainly is not geography’. In a similar vein, Lee (2002, p.353) rebuffs the entire enterprise with the comment that ‘there are . . . precious few grounds for some mutually beneficial conversation here’. Something of these reactions can no doubt be ascribed to geography’s endemic professional anxieties reflecting its relatively low standing on the academic totem pole, certainly by comparison with economics. Krugman’s tasteless self-promotion as the creative genius par excellence of economic geography, and the champion of foursquare thinking generally, did nothing to assuage those anxieties. The geographers’ main complaints about this work have tended to revolve around their concern that it is unduly cut off from the wider social and political frameworks within which economic issues are actually played out. Many economic geographers’ perception of their own work, as well, points to practices of research that are grounded, open, polycentric, focussed on rich empirical description, and deeply conscious of the contingency and complexity of things (Thrift and Olds, 1996; Boddy, 1999). I shall take issue with this particular line of self-justification later, but let us for the moment simply note some of its basic modulations. Thus, Clark (1998, p.75) suggests that ‘a fine-grained substantive appreciation of diversity, combined with empirical methods of analysis like case studies are the proper methods of economic geography’. Martin (1999, p.77) castigates geographical economics for its neglect of ‘real communities in real historical, social and cultural settings’. In a similar vein, Barnes (2003), picking up on the work of Geertz (1983), proclaims that all knowledge is local and that locational analysis in geography is (or should be) born out of specific contextual settings. Some of these comments point to significant deficiencies of geographical economics, and they need to be taken seriously (see also David, 1999). In my opinion, however, they provide at best only peripheral glosses on the main issues at stake and they fail signally to grapple with the target’s central weakness, which, as I hope to demonstrate, reside in its limited analytical grasp of agglomeration economies and locational processes. I would also argue that the geographers’ critique has tended to veer too enthusiastically in favor of the virtues of the empirical and the particular and too forcefully against theoretical systematization and formal analysis, thereby implicitly abdicating from far too much that is of value on their own side (though I suspect that most of the geographers mentioned earlier would not consider this to be a fair judgment of what they are saying). In any case, a scientifically meaningful and politically progressive economic geography can scarcely allow itself to be reduced merely to close dialogue with endless empirical relata (Sayer, 2000; Plummer and Sheppard, 2001). A more penetrating engagement with the internal theoretical structure of geographical economics, it seems to me, is more than overdue. 3.3. An evaluation of the Krugman model One of the obvious failures of earlier neoclassical theories in economic geography and regional science is that their commitment to perfect competition and constant returns induced them to overemphasize the divisibility of economic activities, leading in turn to a radical underemphasis of agglomeration as a force in shaping the economic landscape. Fujita and Thisse (2002) describe the space-economy as seen through neoclassical spectacles as a tending to a system of ‘backyard capitalism’. The originality and value of the Krugman model as an approach to spatial analysis is its formulation of the problem in terms of monopolistic competition and increasing returns within the firm. The notion that agglomeration has its roots at least partially in 486  Scott monopolistic competition is particularly interesting, and corresponds well with the character of much industry today. Modern sectors such as high-technology manufacturing, business and financial services, cultural products, and so on, are especially prone to form distinctive clusters, and it is exactly in such sectors that we find the high levels of product variety, intra-sectoral trade, and the drive to market extension that characterize monopolistic competition. At the same time, the core model breathes new life into the notion of pecuniary externalities as originally formulated by Scitovsky (1954). The emphasis on agglomeration as an outcome of the complex pecuniary effects of Chamberlinian competition and internal economies of scale is unquestionably the model’s principal claim to theoretical significance, and it is all the more interesting because it sets these within a framework of multi-region interdependencies. Once all of this has been said, many reservations remain. At the outset let me state that I do not share the inclination of some geographers to discard the new geographical economics simply on the basis of its commitment to a priori forms of deductive theorizing. In practice, of course, such theorizing sometimes turns in upon itself in highly dysfunctional ways, and economists are notorious for their cultivation of an ingrown professional culture focussed on displays of bravura but vacuous analytics (cf. McClosky, 2002). The Krugman model and its derivative expressions certainly suffer from this syndrome, especially in view of the implausibility and arbitrariness of many of its assumptions, where enormous compromises with reality are made so as to ensure that numerical solutions can be generated,3 and it is tempting to reject the model out of hand on the grounds of its unrealistic assumptions alone. However, I think it better to issue the main challenge from the basis of a related but slightly different perspective. In other words, what is this a model of? It may well be a description of life on some planet somewhere in the universe, but what exactly is its relevance to an understanding of economic realities on planet earth at any time in the past or the foreseeable future? This question is underlined by the fact that the core model puts the emphasis on marketdriven pecuniary relationships in an equilibrium Chamberlinian framework. In so far as it goes, this point of departure has the merit of making inter-regional competitive forces an explicit element of the analysis (as befits its intellectual origins in international trade theory). Its principal deficiency is that it fails adequately to grasp at the notion of the region as a nexus of production relationships and associated social infrastructures from which streams of external economies of scale and scope continually flow, even in 3 Some sectors are taken to be monopolistically competitive; others are deemed subject to perfect competition where this is analytically convenient. Elasticities of demand and substitution are always held constant. Firms have no opportunities for strategic interaction. The multidimensional character of business transactions is reduced to the fiction of iceberg transport costs. Labor is mobile when the algebra demands it; labor is immobile otherwise. Wages are adjustable in some cases, sticky in others. Generalizations of the model to more than two regions result in a world that is shaped like a doughnut, not because this makes any sense in substantive terms but because the mathematics are otherwise intractable. The model contains fixed costs but no sunk costs, and there are thus no inertial barriers to adjustment in the model (where adjustment proceeds relatively rapidly whereas adjustment of the economic landscape in reality tends to be extremely slow). And what exactly is the model’s appropriate spatial scale of resolution? Ottaviano and Thisse (2001) appear to feel, with some justification I believe, that the model of pecuniary externalities works best at a level of resolution where regions approximate the size of the US Manufacturing Belt. The model certainly does not seem to have much relevance to cases where regions are defined at small scales of spatial resolution. For a more extended discussion of the problem of scale in the new geographical economics, see Olsen (2002). A perspective of economic geography  487 single-region economies, and even in cases where competition in final product markets is non-monopolistic. Equally, the model diverts attention away from the fact that for any kind of regional development to occur, productive assets need to be physically mobilized and integrated with one another on the ground in specific regions (Hirschman, 1958). In fact, the model, as such, has virtually nothing to say about the endogenous intra-regional organization and dynamics of production, and almost as little about the region as a motor (as opposed to a receptacle) of economic activity (cf. Scott, 2002b). In more specific terms, and despite the fact that Krugman and his co-workers make frequent reference to Marshall, the model actually gives short shrift to any meaningfully Marshallian approach to regional development and agglomeration.4 Four specific lacunae of the core model merit further attention in this connection: First, the model identifies productive activity only in terms of monopolisticallycompetitive firms with fixed and variable costs. In its initial formulation it makes no reference whatever to the dynamics of the social division of labor and the networks of transactional relations that flow from this process. In later formulations (e.g., Krugman and Venables, 1996; Venables, 1996) an intermediate goods industry is assumed by fiat to exist in the model. However, the model is silent on the endogenous relations that exist in reality between the vertical structure of production and spatially dependent transactions costs. These relations tend to be of special interest and importance in clustered economic systems where intra- and inter-firm transactional structures are usually extremely complex (see, for example, Scott, 1983). Accordingly, the model pays inadequate attention to the wider logic of locational convergence/divergence, and, in particular, it is deficient in its grasp of the individual regional economy as a source of competitive advantage (cf. Porter, 2001). Second, these failings are compounded by the model’s neglect of local labor market processes, such as information flows, job search patterns, labor-force training, and so on (Peck, 1996). True enough, Krugman pays lip service to the existence of processes like these, but makes no effort to incorporate them into the workings of the core model. Third, region-based learning and innovation processes are conspicuous by their absence from the core model. A consequence of this absence is that the core model pays little or no attention to patterns of temporal change in the qualitative attributes and competitive advantages of regional production systems. The rich parallel literature by economists such as Jaffe et al. (1993), Audretsch and Feldman (1996), or Acs (2002) on regional innovation systems compensates in some degree for this omission, but the model itself remains more or less impervious to conceptions of technology-led growth (Acs and Varga, 2002). Fourth, given its resolute commitment to microeconomic forms of analysis, the model actively suppresses the possibility that collective region-based strategies of economic adjustment might play a role in the construction of localized competitive advantages (Neary, 2001). In practice, such strategies are often highly developed in regions with active production systems, both in the private sphere (e.g., inter-firm collaboration), and in the public sphere (e.g., local economic development and training programs under the aegis of regional agencies). Numerous researchers have shown time and again that strategies like 4 Sheppard (2000) makes much the same point. For examples of the Marshallian approach as developed by geographers see Amin and Thrift (1992), Cooke and Morgan (1998), Gertler (2003b), Rigby and Essletzbichler (2002), Scott (1998), Storper (1997). 488  Scott these are critical to the creation of regional competitive advantages and an important tool in the search for improved rates of local economic growth (Bianchi, 1992; Saxenian, 1994; Storper and Scott, 1995; Cooke, 1999). Some of the lacunae pointed out here can no doubt be dealt with in part by appropriate reformulations of the model (such as the introduction of commuting costs to reflect the spatial organization of local labor markets, or explicit reference to coalition formation processes), but at the cost of enormous increases of algebraic complexity. The Krugman model is for the most part a black box that occludes what by many accounts must be seen as some of the most important aspects of regional economic growth and development. As such, it casts only a very limited light on the full the play of externalities, competitive advantage, and locational agglomeration in economic geography. Needless to say, the model is silent on wider social and political issues of relevance to the analysis of agglomeration, such as, for example, region-specific forms of worker socialization and habituation, the emergence of local governance structures, or the historical shifts that occur periodically in technical-organizational structures of accumulation, and that greatly impact regional trajectories of development. By its elevation of atomistic exchange relations to an exclusive ontology of the economic and the geographic (albeit in a Chamberlinian context), the core model provides only a very partial account of the genesis and logic of the economic landscape. In the end, the model can be seen more as an effort to codify atomized market processes in simple spatial frameworks than it is an attempt to understand spatial relations in any thorough-going sense of the term. The strong point of the model is its description of pecuniary externalities in multi-region systems; the weak point is its account of locational adjustment in which units of capital and labor move like billiard balls (except for the ones that have been nailed to the table) from one equilibrium to another, and then simply fall magically into a fully functional economic system as they accumulate in receiving regions. Nevertheless—and to be fair to the wider body of urban and regional economics generally—there is an obvious and encouraging trend in much of the current literature to move beyond the limitations of the core model as expounded by Krugman and to deal in a more flexible and open-ended manner with many of the issues where it is most vulnerable to criticism (see, for example, the essays collected together in Cheshire and Mills, 1999; and Henderson and Thisse, 2004). 4. Capitalism, culture, and geography 4.1. Economic geographers discover culture Just as geographical economics was making its appearance on the academic scene in the early 1990s, a number of economic geographers were transferring their attentions to an altogether different set of approaches rooted in issues of culture. The emergence of this interest coincided with a growing conviction that not only were certain earlier generations of geographers and other social scientists incorrect to regard culture simply as an outcome of underlying economic realities, but that these realities themselves are in fundamental ways subject to the play of cultural forces. Any casual scrutiny of contemporary capitalism reveals at once that it is inflected with different social and cultural resonances in different localities, and that these resonances are directly implicated in the organization of economic life and modalities of economic calculation. American, Japanese, and Chinese capitalism, for example, are at once generically similar and yet are marked by socio-cultural idiosyncrasies with significant effects on the ways in which they function. In addition, production systems in A perspective of economic geography  489 contemporary capitalism, while still obviously highly focused on the mechanical manufacture of things, are shifting more and more into the processing of information and symbols, from business advice to cultural services. This trend is leading to dramatic changes in the form and function of commodified goods and services, and much research is now moving forward on the reception, interpretation, and social effects of these outputs (Jackson, 1999; Thrift, 2000; Bridge and Smith, 2003). This research points to important theoretical issues concerning the hermeneutics of the commodity, and the functions of capitalism generally as a fountainhead of symbolic representation in modern life (e.g., Harvey, 1989; Lash and Urry, 1994). Striking changes are also occurring in the social and psychological make-up of the workplace. Over large areas of the new economy of capitalism, dress, mannerisms, forms of speech, self-presentation, and so on have become essential elements of workers’ performance. Equally, gender, race, ethnicity, and so on, together with specific forms of empathy associated with them are being actively exploited and managed in various ways in the workplace (cf. McDowell, 1997). More generally, markets as a whole could not work in the absence of a sociocultural system regulating the conventions and behaviors that sustain them. These brief remarks, schematic as they may be, already underline the obvious and pressing need for economic geographers to pay close attention to the ways in which culture and economy intersect with one another in mutually constitutive ways. The urgency of this need is reinforced by the observation that the economic and the cultural come together with special intensity in place (Shields, 1999), and that many of the key agglomerations constituting the focal points of the new economy around the world are critically dependent on the complex play of culture. Thus, to an ever-increasing degree, the productive performance of agglomerations like the City of London (Thrift, 1994), Hollywood (Scott, 2002a), or Silicon Valley (Saxenian, 1994) can only be understood in relation to their joint economic and cultural dynamics. Each of these places is shot through with distinctive traditions, sensibilities, and cultural practices that leave deep imprints on phenomena such as management styles, norms of worker habituation, creative and innovative energies, the design of final outputs, and so on, and these phenomena in turn are strongly implicated in processes of local economic growth and development. 4.2. For culture; against the cultural turn In view of the discussion above, it seems fairly safe to say that only a few die-hards and philistines are likely to make strenuous objections to attempts to bring culture more forcefully into the study of economic geography. In spite of the neologisms and cliché-ridden prose that Martin and Sunley (2001) rightly complain about, there is obviously a significant nexus of ideas in a more culturally-inflected economic geography that responds in a very genuine way to major problems posed by contemporary capitalist society. Once this point has been made, however, a number of the reforms of economic geography that have been most strenuously advocated under the rubric of the cultural turn are rather less obviously acceptable, and have recently been subject to heated debate by economic geographers (see, for example, Sayer, 1997; Martin and Sunley, 2001; Plummer and Sheppard, 2001; Rodrı́guez-Pose, 2001; Storper, 2001). This debate has tended to find its sharpest expression in relation to the curious reluctance by some proponents of the cultural turn to make any concession to the play of economic processes in economic geography except insofar as they are an 490  Scott expression of underlying cultural dynamics. In a number of their more fervent statements, indeed, some of these proponents occasionally verge on an inversion of the classical Marxian conceit to the effect that culture flows uni-causally from the economy, by offering equally exaggerated claims about the influence of culture on the economy. In a statement that displays much enthusiasm about the study of culture and much acrimony in regard to the discipline of economics, Amin and Thrift (2000) essentially recommend withdrawal from economic analysis, as such, and a wholesale re-description of economic realities in terms of cultural points of reference. Thus, in writing about the problem of eventuation they one-sidedly argue that ‘acting into the words confirms the discourse and makes a new real’ (p.6), so that in their formulation, the economy becomes nothing more than a series of ‘performances’ derived from a script. Elsewhere, Thrift (2001) further proclaims that the new economy of the 1990s was fundamentally a rhetorical phenomenon. The argument here starts off promisingly enough with an examination of the role of the press, business consultants, financial advisors, and the like, in helping to foment the fast-paced, high-risk economic environment of the period, but then it veers into the blunt assertion that the new economy as a whole can be understood simply as a discursive construct. In formulations like these, basic economic realities—the state of technology, the rhythms of capital accumulation and investment, the rate of profit, the flow of circulating capital, etc.—become just so much inert plasma to be written upon this way or that as cultural shifts occur and as revisions of the script are introduced. Certainly, words are a critical moment in the circuit of mediations through which economic reality operates, and there can be no doubt that many unique effects are set in motion at this particular level of analysis. Conversely, and it is puzzling that so trivial and obvious a point should need to be made, there are also deeply-rooted economic logics and dynamics at work in the contemporary space-economy, and at least some of these (such as the dynamics of industrial organization, or the increasing returns effects that lie at the root of industrial districts), require investigation on their own terms above and beyond invocations of the causal powers of discourse and culture. In a series of recent writings, Barnes (e.g., 1996; 2001; 2003), has pursued a related line of investigation opened up by the cultural turn. Barnes’ work is much influenced by Derrida and Rorty, and is centrally focussed on the metaphorical and narratological character of geographical writing. There is actually much of interest in the approach Barnes takes. He has many useful things to say about the ideologies and working habits of economic geographers, as well as about the rhetorical devices that they deploy in their written reports. This helps among other things to keep us focussed on the critical idea that our intellectual encounters with the real are always deeply theory-dependent (Sunley, 1996). But as the plot thickens—or thins, according to your taste—we steadily lose sight of economic geography as a discipline with concrete substantive concerns (such as regional development or income inequalities), for these simply dissolve away into the primacy of the text and its metaphorical perplexities. I am perfectly prepared to admit that there may be strong elements of metaphor in, for example, a geography of hunger, but I certainly have no sympathy for the idea that hunger is just a metaphor, if only on the ad hominem grounds that it has painful physical manifestations and morbid long-term effects. Here, the legitimate claim that we can only know the world through socially-constructed codes of reference seems to have given way to the sophism that all we can know about the world is the codes themselves. An even more extreme case of the solipsism that haunts much of the cultural turn can be found in the book by Gibson-Graham (1996) about strategic possibilities for progressive A perspective of economic geography  491 social change in contemporary capitalism. The central arguments of the book hinge upon the proposition that the criteria for validating a theory are purely internal to the theory to be validated. As Gibson-Graham writes (p.60): ‘We cannot argue that our theory has more explanatory power or greater proximity to the truth than other theories because there is no common standard which could serve as the instrument of such a metatheoretical validation process’. If this proposition were indeed true it would presumably undermine much of the point in Gibson-Graham proceeding any further in her argument, though she does in fact continue on for another 200-odd pages. In the course of this discussion, the relativism of her main thesis is steadily transformed from a merely academic exercise into a political agenda of sorts. Thus, she announces (p.260), ‘the way to begin to break free of capitalism is to turn its prevalent representations on their heads’. Presto. Not even a hint about a possible transitional program, or a few suggestions about, say, practical reform of the banking system. The claim is presented in all its baldness, without any apparent consciousness that attempts to break free of any given social system are likely to run into the stubborn realities of its indurated social and property relations as they actually exist. More generally, GibsonGraham’s argument leads inexorably beyond the perfectly acceptable notion that all intellectual work is theory-dependent and into those murky tracts of idealist philosophy where reality is merely a reflection of theory, and where theory produces social change independently of concrete practice and disciplined attention to the refractory resistances of things as they really are. So, quite apart from its dysfunctional depreciation of the role of economic forces and structural logics in economic geography, the cultural turn also opens a door to a disconcerting strain of philosophical idealism and political voluntarism in modern geography. The net effect is what we might call economistic grand theory in reverse: a remarkable failure to recognize sensible boundaries as to just what precisely a cultural theory of the economy can achieve, and a concomitant over-promotion of the notion that social and economic transformation involves nothing more than the unmediated power of theoretical ideas. Again, nothing in this argument is intended to deny the important continuities and intersections between culture and economy or the significance of the economy as a site of cultural practices; neither is it in any sense an attempt to eject the study of cultural economy from geography. The problem is not ‘culture’ but the cultural turn as it has emerged out of cultural studies with its militant project of reinterpreting all social relations as cultural relations, and its na€
ve, if understandable, attempt to humanize the iron cage of capitalist accumulation by unwarranted culturalization of its central economic dynamics (Rojek and Turner, 2000; Eagleton, 2003). 5. Toward a re-synthesis As I have tried to show in this paper, Krugman-style geographical economics offers at best an extremely narrow vision of the dynamics of the economic landscape, and is in any case, less preoccupied with geography as such than it is with geography as just another domain within which markets unfold. Geographers and economists certainly occupy much common ground at the present time, but encounters between them on this shared terrain are endemically susceptible to deeply-seated disputes about theoretical priorities. My guess is that the influence of the Krugman model will in any case soon wither away as geographical economics comes up against the model’s inner and outer limits, just as neoclassical regional science began to show signs of enervation after the mid1970s in part as a consequence of its commitment to the strait-jacket of convexity and 492  Scott constant returns to scale (cf. Thisse, 1997; Neary, 2001). As it happens, any such retreat may just possibly help to open up opportunities for more fruitful future encounters between geographers and economists over issues of space (see also Sjöberg and Sjöholm, 2002). For the present, the undisputed major contribution of geographical economics to our understanding of spatial problems has been its resuscitation of the notion of pecuniary externalities in a world of Chamberlinian competition. The cultural turn, for its part, has sought to take economic geography in an altogether different direction. In some degree, of course, the clashing claims of economic geographers and cultural geographers over the last decade or so can be interpreted as expressions of an internal power struggle for status and influence in the profession of geography as a whole. This struggle owes much to the unquestioned intellectual re-invigoration and consequent self-assertion of cultural geography that occurred over the 1990s as cultural studies expanded in the academy at large. Despite the clashes, there remains, as I have indicated, much useful work to be accomplished by cooperation between economic and cultural geographers in any effort to comprehend the spatiality and locational dynamics of modern capitalism (Gregson et al., 2001; Bathelt and Gl€ uckler, 2003; Gertler 2003a; Yeung, 2003). At the same time, there will undoubtedly continue to be strong points of divergence between the two subdisiciples; lines of investigation opened up by economic geographers where cultural geographers hesitate to tread, and vice versa. A degree of mutual tolerance (though certainly not automatic and uncritical mutual endorsement) is no doubt called for in this situation. Notwithstanding all the theoretical turbulence of the last few decades, there is probably still wide agreement among economic geographers, as such, that one of the main tasks we face is in the end some sort of transformative understanding of the historical geography of capitalist society (Harvey, 1982; Harvey and Scott, 1989). I suspect, as well, that most economic geographers would agree with the proposition that we need some sort of new synthesis in order to pursue this task more effectively (cf. Castree, 1999), i.e., a revised cognitive map that can help us make sense of all the complex contemporary tendencies that have turned what critical theorists used hopefully to call ‘late capitalism’ into the triumphant and rejuvenated juggernaut that it is today. I make this claim about the need for a new synthesis in full cognizance of the reductionist dangers that it opens up (cf. Amin and Robbins, 1990; Sayer, 2000). Equally, I want to avoid the self-defeating conclusion that because of these dangers we must always downsize our theoretical ambitions. One of the truly disconcerting aspects of much geographical work today is that it preaches a doctrine that privileges the small, the piecemeal, and the local, even as capital plays out its own grandiose saga of expansion and recuperation at an increasingly globalized scale. A prospective economic geography capable of dealing with the contemporary world must hew closely, it seems to me, to the following programmatic goals if it is to achieve a powerful purchase on both scientific insight and progressive political strategy. 1. To begin at the beginning: economic geography needs to work out a theoretical re-description of capitalism as a structure of production and consumption and as an engine of accumulation, taking into account the dramatic changes that have occurred in recent decades in such phenomena as technology, forms of industrial and corporate organization, financial systems, labor markets, and so on. This theoretical re-description must be sensitive to the generic or quasi-generic forms of capitalist development that occur in different times in different places, which, in turn, entails attention to the kinds of issues that regulation theorists have A perspective of economic geography 2. 3. 4. 5. 5  493 identified under the general rubric of regimes of accumulation (Aglietta, 1976; Lipietz, 1986). In addition to these economic concerns, we must recognize that contemporary capitalism is intertwined with enormously heterogeneous forms of social and cultural life, and that no one element of this conjoint field is necessarily reducible to the other. Directions of causality and influence across this field are a matter of empirical investigation, not of theoretical pre-judgment. Note that in this formulation, class becomes only one possible dimension of social existence out of a multiplicity of other actual and possible dimensions. This nexus of economic, social, and cultural relationships constitutes a creative field or environment within which complex processes of entrepreneurship, learning, and innovation occur. Geographers have a special interest in deciphering the spatial logic of this field and in demonstrating how it helps to shape locational dynamics. In combination with these modalities of economic and social reality, we need to reserve a specific analytical and descriptive space for collective action and institutional order at many different levels of spatial and organizational scale (the firm, the local labor market, the region, the nation, etc.), together with a due sense of the political tensions and rivalries that run throughout this sphere of human development. By the same token, a vibrant economic geography will always not only be openly policy-relevant (Markusen, 1999), but also politically engaged. A key question in this context is how to build local institutional frameworks that promote both economic success and social justice. We must recognize that social and economic relations are often extremely durable, and that they have a propensity to become independent in varying degree of the individuals caught up within them. This means that any normative account of social transformation and political strategy, must deal seriously with the idea that there are likely to be stubborn resistances to change rooted in these same relations. The solutions to this problem proposed by sociologists like Bourdieu (1972) and Giddens (1979) strike me as providing reasonable bases for pushing forward in this respect, for they explicitly recognize the inertia of social structures while simultaneously insisting on the integrity of individual human volition. Unfortunately, these solutions (most especially the structure-agency formulation of Giddens) have been much diluted in recent years by reinterpretations that lean increasingly heavily on the agency side of the equation, partly as a reflection of the cultural turn, partly out of a misplaced fear of falling into the pit of determinism.5 Invocations of unmediated agency (or, for that matter, neoclassical utility) as an It is useful here to recall the early argument of Martin (1951) to the effect that any self-respecting determinism insists on a direct mechanistic link from matter or the external world to mind so that what passes for free will is (so the determinist would say) nothing more than a cause-effect relationship. The existence of structural constraints on human action, or even the emergence of common social predipositions and habits, do not, by this standard of judgment, amount to any form of determinism. Nor can determinism in this rigorous sense necessarily be equated with the existence of macro-social outcomes that occur independently of any explicit decision that the world should be structured thus and so, or with situations where these outcomes assume ‘laws of motion’ without our explicit permission, as it were (e.g., the pervasive separation of home and work in the modern metropolis and the daily waves of commuting that are a result of this circumstance). Mutatis mutandis, when geographers invoke unmediated ‘agency’ or ‘volition’ as an explanatory variable, they are implicitly confessing to a failure of analysis, even though agency and volition are always a component of any human action. 494  Scott explanatory variable in social science are often little more than confessions of ignorance, in the sense that when we are unable to account for certain kinds of relationships or events, we are often tempted to fall back on the reassuring notion that things are thus and so for no other reason than because that’s the way we want them to be, irrespective of any underlying structural conditions. 6. A corollary of the structured organization and sunk costs of social life is that economic relationships (especially when they are locationally interrelated, as in the case of a regional production system) are likely to be path-dependent. This observation suggests at once that an evolutionary perspective is well suited to capture important elements of the dynamics of the economic landscape (cf. Nelson and Winter, 1982; Boschma and Lambooy, 1999). It follows that any attempt to describe the economic landscape in terms of instantaneous adjustment and readjustment to a neoclassical optimum optimorum is intrinsically irrelevant. 7. All of these moments of economic and social reality occur in a world in which geography has not yet been—and cannot yet be—abolished (Leamer and Storper, 2001). The dynamics of accumulation shape geographic space, and equally importantly, geographic space shapes the dynamics of accumulation. This means, too, that capitalism is differentiated at varying levels of spatial resolution, from the local to the global, and that sharp differences occur in forms of life from place to place. Indeed, as globalization now begins to run its course, geographic space becomes more important, not less important, because it presents ever-widening possibilities for finely-grained locational specialization and differentiation. Critical analysis of these possibilities must be one of modern economic geography’s principal concerns. 8. Finally, I want to enter a plea for methodological variety and openness. One corollary of this plea is that economic geographers need to recover the lost skills of quantitative analysis, not out of some atavistic impulse to reinstate the economic geography of the 1960s, but because of the proven value of these skills in the investigation of economic data. The steady erosion of geographers’ capabilities in this regard over the last couple of decades is surely a net loss to the discipline. These remarks still leave open a wide range of alternative research strategies and theoretical orientations in economic geography, including approaches marked variously by heavy doses of algebraic formalization or cultural commentary. A particular point of focus, however, is provided by the continuing commitment by significant numbers of economic geographers to critical analysis and to the search for progressive social change. The pursuit of some sort of social democratic agenda and the fight against global neoliberalism, it seems to me, must stand high in any set of priorities in this regard at the present time, and all the more so as our world remains an arena in which tremendous variations in living standards, economic opportunity, and possibilities for cultural self-realization persist tenaciously from place to place and country to country. More than anything else, the great testing ground for economic geography, now and in the foreseeable future, must surely be identified in one way or another in relation to the central question of development, not only in its expression as a problem in historical geography, but as a normative project of global significance. A perspective of economic geography  495 Economic geographers have much work to do in dealing with the multiple challenges of this evolving situation. But they also need periodically to take critical soundings of their tools, their practices, and their theoretical commitments if they are to remain equal to the daunting tasks ahead. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jeffrey Boggs, Steven Brakman, Harry Garretsen, David Rigby, Michael Storper, and Jacques Thisse for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. None of these individuals bears any responsibility for the opinions expressed here. References Abdel-Rahman, H., Fujita, M. 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